Qualcomm DragonWing

Qualcomm DragonWing are industrial-grade boards that provides various series of processors such as IQ6 (QCS615), IQ8 (QCS8300), IQ9 (QCS9100) and Q8 (QCS8550). These SoCs are used for factory/industry based applications. Note that the QCS8550 is a derivative of the SM8550 with the RF modem removed, so the SM8550 defconfig works for both the SM8550 and the QCS8550. More information can be found on the Qualcomm’s IQ6 product page, Qualcomm’s IQ8 product page, Qualcomm’s IQ9 product page and Qualcomm’s Q8 product page.

Installation

First, setup CROSS_COMPILE for aarch64. Then, build U-Boot for QCS615, QCS8300, QCS9100 or SM8550:

$ export CROSS_COMPILE=<aarch64 toolchain prefix>
$ make qcom_qcs8300_defconfig
$ make -j8

Although the board does not have secure boot set up by default, the firmware still expects firmware ELF images to be “signed” in the MBN format. This is handled automatically with mkmbn (see Qualcomm Image Signing for more details).

Just flash the resulting u-boot.mbn to the uefi_a partition on your device with fastboot flash uefi_a u-boot.mbn.

U-Boot should be running after a reboot (fastboot reboot).

Note that fastboot is not yet supported in U-Boot on Dragonwing boards, as a result, to flash back the original firmware, or new versoins of the U-Boot, EDL mode must be used.

A tool like bkerler’s edl can be used for flashing with the firehose loader (for example, for QCS9100 the firehose loader can be obtained from dragonwing IQ9 bootbinaries.)

$ edl.py --loader /path/to/prog_firehose_ddr.elf w uefi_a u-boot.mbn